xBlog: The original visual thinking weblog

At XPLANE|STL’s public Visual Thinking School on April 7 we thought the time had come for a little character building. Specifically, cartoon characters and how just a few pen strokes can convey emotion and tell a story. We were inspired by Ivan Brunetti’s YouTube trailer for his new book “Cartooning,” below, and decided to do a few related drawing exercises.

WARM-UP

Everyone took dry erase marker in hand as I read through the following sequence, one line at a time. Remember — no one knew what was coming next.

1. A little girl has just woken up, dizzy, cold and crying.
2. She had a nightmare that she threw up…
3. all over her cat…
4. and the cat died…
5. and now the cat’s ghost haunts her.

What can I say, I like dark humor.

For the main exercise we took Brunetti’s video exercise linked above and changed it slightly. We had 14 people so we paired up into seven groups to create a few Wordless Stories.

PART 1 (30 minutes)

1. Think of a character, any character.
2. Now think of a location, some place or setting for your character.
3. Take four index cards and draw a four-panel strip of your character without using words.
4. Draw the character in the location that you chose facing a challenge.

PART 2 (20 minutes)

1. Go back to the beginning of the sequence and draw 2 more panels to make the motivation behind the character’s action more clear.
2. Then go to the end of the sequence and draw 2 more panels to show some consequence of the action depicted.

One of the characters.

A full panel. Click to view larger.

Rapid creation (and beer — VTS runs 4-6 p.m.) always leads to very lively and unexpected results. Visit our VTS Flickr Set to see more examples.

FINALE

After going round the room and reviewing each other’s work, we sat back and enjoyed Matthias Hoegg’s beautiful animated short, “Thursday.” We marveled at how much story and emotion he was able to create without using a single word.